Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: 5 startup theses that will transform the 2020s

• October 27, 2020
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I wrote a call to action for the tech community to dive deeper into the future of innovation this coming decade. Where are some of the hot spots going to come from though? Below, I have assembled a very loose set of five clusters broadly categorized into “wellness,” “climate,” “data society,” “creativity,” and “fundamentals” that

I wrote a call to action for the tech community to dive deeper into the future of innovation this coming decade. Where are some of the hot spots going to come from though? Below, I have assembled a very loose set of five clusters broadly categorized into “wellness,” “climate,” “data society,” “creativity,” and “fundamentals” that offer some scaffolding for understanding what’s about to come this decade and how and any entrepreneur — really, any citizen — can start to build progress.

Take these ideas as inspirational — they aren’t limits, nor should the borders of these categories be seen as anything but liminal. I know in the daily cavalcade of news, it can be hard to fell inspired by the future. But do be! There is so much more coming this decade, that we may look back at the 2010s as the dark ages of innovation.

“Wellness”

First, there is a cluster around “wellness.” That sometimes gets elided to just “mental health” and reduced to a prescription bottle, but this area really encompasses so much more than that. How do we build humanistic societies with strong social fabrics that enliven, enrich, and build meaning for our lives?

Yes, we’ve seen strong demand for wellness apps like Calm and Headspace. Exercise hardware like Peloton, Mirror and others along with platforms particularly around group classes have been a huge mainstay during this pandemic era. Mental health treatment itself is getting a makeover as startups reinvigorate the in-person therapist and psychiatrist visit as well as think about new models of delivering mental health services virtually. Even LSD is starting to make headways as a potentially useful tool, and psychedelics are going to be an interesting area to watch in the coming years.

All those areas still are ripe for innovation, yet, how do we go deeper and start to address the root causes of anguish and despair?

Take work, for instance. How do we make workers feel more secure and meaningful in a remote world where gig work makes up an increasing fraction of all employment? The precariousness of labor has a direct effect on wellness, and it’s going to take a much greater leap than a reclassification battle like in California this election cycle to make work “work” for all people. What can we do around stability of pay whether from employment or maybe programs like universal basic income to give people a sense of ownership over their destinies?

How do we start to create the bonds of neighborhoods and communities that hold people together and offer solace in times of despair? Part of this is improving the average town and making it more human-centric (that’s like 20 startups right there), but it also includes constructing more vibrant and expressive virtual worlds where we can find online neighborhoods that are safer than the dumpster fires we find on the web today.

Then there’s the health system in general. While America deservedly receives huge criticism for its overpriced and under-insured system, health systems worldwide face incredible pressures to improve efficiency. How do we make care better, more personalized, and more open? How do we reduce costs while ensuring that care is accurate and delivered expeditiously? There is huge work to be done to make health a key component.

To increase wellness for individuals, we need to increase wellness for our societies, building systems that are designed for the humans that inhabit them. Flexibility with security, engagement with individuality, expression with support. Our existing systems are already antiquated — and we haven’t come up with anything better.

This cluster is about asking “How does the world make us feel?”

“Climate”

The second cluster has to do broadly with the Earth, climate, crisis, and resilience. Climate change is real and not going away, and quite literally billions of people are going to feel its effects in the coming decades. Rising tides, massive hurricanes, power outages, wildfires, droughts and more are going to become part of our daily news vernacular.

Resiliency is not something that any one technology can offer, but innovation has huge potential to allow more of our systems to adapt to the changing nature of our world today.

News: Stark raises $1.5M for a toolkit that helps developers and others create more inclusive design

• October 27, 2020
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Diversity and inclusion are slowly, slowly moving away from being an afterthought (or worse, a no-thought) in the tech world. And to underscore the new attention the area is getting — in every aspect of the concept — today a startup that’s building tools to help designers and developers make their end products more accessible

Diversity and inclusion are slowly, slowly moving away from being an afterthought (or worse, a no-thought) in the tech world. And to underscore the new attention the area is getting — in every aspect of the concept — today a startup that’s building tools to help designers and developers make their end products more accessible to people with visual impairments is announcing some funding.

Stark, a New York-based startup that lets designers others building with design software run their files through an integrated tool that checks it and provides color edits and other suggestions to help them meet guidelines for people who see less well, has picked up $1.5 million.

Stark plans to use the funding to continue building integrations into commonly-used design apps and create integrations for developers (where it will read and provide guidance on code: next up is a Github integration), and continue building out its business with expanded pricing and usage tiers.

Currently, users can use plugins of Stark on Figma, Sketch & Adobe XD that let them access a Contrast Checker, Smart Color Suggestions, 8 Colorblind Simulations, a Colorblind Generator, and Rapid Contrast Checking (on Adobe XD).

Longer term, the plan is to build and end-to-end platform and to address inclusivity for other kinds of needs beyond visual impairments, and, since accessibility can come in physical forms, too, to consider more than just software, and to create more ways to automatically correct details.

As Cat Noone — the now-European-based CEO who co-founded the company with Michael Fouquet (the team is working remotely, she said) — describes it, the ambition is to “become the Grammarly for accessibility in software.”

The funding, a pre-seed round, is coming from a wide and interesting group of backers. It was led by Daniel Darling and Pascal Unger from Darling Ventures, with participation also from Jason Warner, the CTO of Github; Indicator Ventures; Kleiner Perkins’ Scout Fund; and Basecamp Ventures. Individual backers include the product lead for accessibility at Atlassian, the director of equitable design & impact at Culture Amp, a director of design at DuckDuckGo, a former VP of software development at Oracle, and more.

Part of the reason that Stark has gotten attention from all of these investors is because of its traction.

Early versions of the software have been out for eight months now, in the form of the plugins for Sketch, Adobe XD and Figma, and in that time it’s clocked up 300,000 users, mostly designers, engineers, and product managers across those three design platforms, with current customers including people from Microsoft, Oscar Health, US Bank, Instagram, Pfizer, Volkswagen, Dropbox and more.

It also has 10,000 people in its “community”, which includes people engaging with Stark more directly (rather than just using its plugins), on platforms like Slack, getting its newsletter and more.

Diversity and inclusion have been in the headlines this year, which is good news, even if the reason for it has been not so good — the sorry state of how minorities are treated by law enforcement. Partly because of the profile of those incidents and the subsequent protests, much of the world has associated the concept of D&I very closely with racial inclusion. While that story continues to unfold (and we hopefully continue see more positive and sustained efforts to address it), the kind of diversity and inclusion Stark is addressing is of a different sort.

It’s a logical, if often overlooked area: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that (as of 2018) around one in every four adults in the U.S. alone live with some form of disability (a figure that doesn’t count children), with the biggest of these being cognitive disabilities. This essentially means that while a lot of design (and tech in general) is not really built to address this wider group, it’s a very sizable market.

At a time when technology is regularly made out to be the bad guy — and the reasons are many, touching on mental health; physical health; and economic, environmental, civil and legal impacts — designing software and hardware that is more inclusive could go a very long way in bridging some of those gaps that tech has created with (and within) society.

“We’re talking about the largest minority group in the U.S.,” Noone said. “You wouldn’t build a building today without a wheelchair ramp, so why aren’t we accounting for those individuals in our software design?”

Noone said that she and Fouquet originally landed on the idea of Stark when they were doing some work for another firm, building an emergency services app that would get used by the elderly. They built a very early version of the tool for themselves to use in that work. Showing it to others, they found people asking if they could use it, too. “And then it just kind of snowballed,” she said.

She then said that she found herself going down a “rabbit hole into the world of design and accessibility” and realised that not only were there no tools really built to address this out there, but that there was “so much more to the problem than colors.” (Colors was where Stark started, hence the great name.)

There is an interesting stick and carrot in the bigger market with things like inclusive design: for some it might be an issue of having to comply, others simply believe it’s the right thing to do, while yet others may not care but (rather cynically) believe being inclusive is a good look. Whatever the motivation is, the trick with Stark is that it’s making it easy to be inclusive for more people, and lowering the barrier at the end of the day can only be a good thing.

“No software product should exclude a disadvantaged minority of their users. It’s bad for business and bad for society,” said Darling in a statement. “We’re seeing dramatic increasing awareness amongst software designers, developers and executives to ship products that are universally accessible. Stark has quickly earned the trust of the industry and is on a path to become an important part of software infrastructure. We’re thrilled to partner with such a mission driven company that is already improving how software is produced around the world.”​

 

News: Wyze launches version 3 of its $20 security camera

• October 27, 2020
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Wyze first made a name for itself when it launched its $20 indoor security camera a few years ago. Since then, the company branched out into other smart home products, ranging from doorbells to scales. Today, it’s going back to its origins with the launch of the Wyze Cam V3, the third generation of its

Wyze first made a name for itself when it launched its $20 indoor security camera a few years ago. Since then, the company branched out into other smart home products, ranging from doorbells to scales. Today, it’s going back to its origins with the launch of the Wyze Cam V3, the third generation of its flagship camera.

The new version is still $20 (though that’s without shipping unless there’s a free shipping promotion in the Wyze store), but the company redesigned both the outside and a lot of the hardware inside the camera, which is now also IP65 rated, so you can now use it outdoors, too.

The Cam V3 now also features new sensors that enable color night vision, thanks to an F1.6 aperture lens that captures 40 percent more light than the previous version. That lens now also covers a 130-degree field of view (up from 110 degrees in V2) and the company pushed up the frames per second from 15 during the day and 10 at night to 20 and 15 respectively.

The company also enhanced the classic black and white night vision mode — which you’ll still need when it’s really dark outside or in the room you are monitoring — by adding a second set of infrared lights to the camera.

Other new features are an 80dB siren to deter unwanted visitors. This feature is triggered by Wyze’s AI-powered person-detection capability, but that’s a feature the company recently moved behind its $2/month CamPlus paywall, after originally offering it for free. That’s not going to break the bank (and you get a generous free trial period), but it’d be nice if the company could’ve kept this relatively standard feature free and instead only charged for extra cloud storage or more advanced features (though you do get free 14-day rolling cloud storage for 12-second clips).

Wyze provided me with a review unit ahead of today’s launch (and a Cam V2 to compare them). The image quality of the new camera is clearly better and the larger field of view makes a difference, even though the distortion at the edges is a bit more noticeable now (but given the use case, that’s not an issue). The new night color vision mode works as promised and I like that you can set the camera to automatically switch between them based on the lighting conditions.

The person detection has been close to 100% accurate — and unlike some competing cameras that don’t feature this capability, I didn’t get any false alarms during rain or when the wind started blowing leaves across the ground.

If you already have a Wyze Cam V2, you don’t need to upgrade to this new one — the core features haven’t changed all that much, after all. But if you’re in the market for this kind of camera and aren’t locked into a particular security system, it’s hard to beat the new Wyze Cam.

News: Next-gen skincare, silk without spiders and pollution for lunch: Meet the biotech startups pitching at IndieBio’s Demo Day

• October 27, 2020
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Biotech can often, and sometimes literally, fly over our heads. However, the pandemic has shown an increased need for investment and focus on solutions that work on human and planetary health. For IndieBio, a science and biotech accelerator run by VC firm SOSV, this unprecedented year offered high stakes and new challenges. Today and tomorrow,

Biotech can often, and sometimes literally, fly over our heads. However, the pandemic has shown an increased need for investment and focus on solutions that work on human and planetary health. For IndieBio, a science and biotech accelerator run by VC firm SOSV, this unprecedented year offered high stakes and new challenges.

Today and tomorrow, the biotech accelerator is hosting its twice-annual demo day.

Starting in 2015, IndieBio has provided resources to founders solving complex challenges with biotech, from fake meat to sustainability. Over the years, the accelerator has created a portfolio of biotech companies valued at over $3.2 billion, including companies like Memphis Meats, which develops cultured meat from animal cells; NotCo, a plant-based food brand; and Catalog, which uses organisms for data storage.

As part of the accelerator, each participating company receives $250,000 in capital, numerous other services and access to lab space. In July, the founder and head of IndieBio, Arvind Gupta, left his position to pursue a role at Mayfield. While Gupta remains an adviser, Po Bronson took the role as the new managing director.

Bronson was immediately put to the test. This year, the program expanded from operating solely in San Francisco to also create a cohort based in New York. It also doubled the amount of companies it invested in, bringing this cohort to 20 companies.

As you can imagine, lockdowns ultimately forced founders to delay key lab work in the beginning of the pandemic. Eventually, founders were able to partner with universities, contract research organizations or other biotech accelerators to begin their research, says Maya Lockwood, the head of investor relations at SOSV. The NYC class received a “golden ticket” for free lab space come November.

And these dynamics make this cohort all the more fascinating to dive into.

Watch the New York Stream here, which will happen on Tuesday October 27 from 1:00-3:00pm ET.

Watch the San Francisco stream here, which will happen on Wednesday October 28 from 10:00-12:00pm PT.

For those who can’t tune in, here’s a list of all the companies presenting in New York and San Francisco over the next two days.

San Francisco cohort

Reazent: Founded by Sumit Verma, Reazent has discovered and patented a way to manipulate soil bacteria into triggering crops to grow more. It works with 116 strains, from kale to potatoes, and wants to dig into the market of organic agricultural land.

Kraken Sense: Founded by Nisha Sarveswaran, Kraken Sense has created an in-line autonomous device to measure the concentration of pathogens in large-scale food and water systems. The product can be deployed in farms and kitchens and uses refillable single-use cartridges.

Advanced Microbubbles: The startup, led by Jameel Feshitan, has created a platform that helps practitioners deliver drugs to complex and difficult tumors. The company collaborated with NIH NIDA and uses proprietary bubbles to deliver chemotherapeutics. Currently, Microbubbles is working to solve two types of cancers: neuroblastoma and pancreatic cancer.

Cybele Microbiome: CEO Nicole Scott has created a direct-to-consumer skincare line with a focus on prebiotics. The line uses ingredients that work in tandem with the skin microbiome, even triggering it to express natural scents.

Ivy Natal: Ivy Natal is developing a process to harvest healthy human egg cells from skin cells. CEO Colin Bortner is working on a treatment for infertility and plans to enable families to have genetic children who can’t otherwise with current solutions.

Microgenesis: Led by Gabriela Gutierrez, Microgenesis has created a proprietary test and nutraceutical regiment (including probiotics) to help women who struggle with infertility get pregnant. The company worked with a cohort of 287 mothers, and with its product over 75% of patients became pregnant.

AsimicA: Led by Nikolai Mushnikov, Asmicia has created a new way to bring stem cells to microbes. The company could lengthen and grow the yields of bio-manufacturing, and is currently working to select the right fermentation partner.

Liberum: CEO Aiden Tinafar is working to disrupt what they think could be a $400 billion market opportunity: recombinant proteins. Liberum has created a protein printer that could cut down the creation of custom recombinant proteins from weeks to a few hours.

Khepra: Led by Julie Kring, Khepra is leveraging fuel production as a way to store extra renewable energy. The company is building a series of reactors that could take your old plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, extract chemicals and fuels, and sell that fuel to refineries.

Carbix: Carbix, led by Quincy Sammy, takes enriched CO2 and converts it into raw material that can then be repurposed into industrial products.

Spintext: CEO Alex Greenhalgh is creating a new, scalable way of making silk. The company mimics spider spinning and uses a natural protein, with an end product that they see as better than premium silk.

New York cohort

Biomage: CEO Adam Kurkiewicz wants to make single-cell sequencing data more accessible for research biologistics. The technology could help scientists explore human cells to enhance medicine and drug discovery.

Diptera.ai: Vic Levitin is creating a scalable, affordable and sustainable way to fight mosquitoes and their diseases.

Cayuga Biotech: Damien Kudela, CEO of Cayuga Biotech, has created a drug that could induce clots and stop severe bleeding situations.

Brightcure: Chiara Heide, CEO of Brightcure, has created a bioactive cream that uses natural bacterium to restore a woman’s natural microbiome.

Multus Media: CEO Cai Linton is producing an ingredient that hopes to make cultivated meat production affordable and accessible.

BioFeyn: The company uses nanotechnologies based on human medicine to deliver nutrients and disease prevention to fish. CEO Timothy Bouley is working to make eating healthy fish a sustainable practice.

Halomine: Ted Eveleth, CEO, wants to turn every surface into an antimicrobial surface. Halomine’s product, Halofilm, can be used in tandem with any household bleach cleaner to enhance disinfection techniques.

Allied Microbiota: Lauralynn Kourtz, CEO of Allied Microbiota, wants to use natural microbes to eliminate toxic waste. The company uses bacteria to clean contaminated soils.

Scindo: Scindo, led by Gustaf Hemberg, uses enzymes to make plastic biodegradable.

News: Ubisoft’s subscription service comes to Stadia and Luna

• October 27, 2020
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Ubisoft originally announced its subscription service back in June. Today, the company is rebranding the service from UPlay+ to Ubisoft+. The service is also on its way to Amazon’s Luna and Google’s Stadia. Ubisoft is betting on a multi-platform subscription, which means that you’ll be able to subscribe once and play Ubisoft+ games on PC,

Ubisoft originally announced its subscription service back in June. Today, the company is rebranding the service from UPlay+ to Ubisoft+. The service is also on its way to Amazon’s Luna and Google’s Stadia. Ubisoft is betting on a multi-platform subscription, which means that you’ll be able to subscribe once and play Ubisoft+ games on PC, Amazon Luna and Stadia.

Ubisoft+ is already available on PC. For $14.99 a month, you can download and play more than 100 games — the service includes both classics and newly released titles, such as games in the Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia franchises as well as the company’s upcoming releases. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Watch Dogs Legion and Immortals Fenyx Rising will be available in the Ubisoft+ library on their respective launch days.

Ubisoft is trying to include premium editions of the games so that you don’t have to pay for game passes to access additional content. For instance, you can play the ultimate editions of Rainbow Six Siege, The Division 2, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, etc.

On November 10, you’ll be able to access Ubisoft+ games on Amazon Luna is you’re beta testing Amazon’s cloud gaming service. And Google will also let you connect your Ubisoft+ account with Stadia by the end of the year. Interestingly, you don’t need to pay for Stadia Pro to access Ubisoft+ titles.

Ubisoft is working on cross-platform progression, starting with upcoming titles. It’s a subscription focused on content, not platforms.

As you can see, Microsoft and Sony don’t support Ubisoft+. It means that you won’t be able to subscribe and play on your Xbox or PlayStation. Console manufacturers take a cut on game purchases. That’s why negotiations between third-party game studios and console manufacturers are more complicated.

News: Hands-on: Sony’s DualSense PS5 controller could be a game changer

• October 27, 2020
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After spending a few hours with the PlayStation 5 and its completely redesigned DualSense controller, I can say with confidence that the new haptics and audio features certainly work — and could become integral to the gaming experience. But only if — and it’s a big if — developers truly embrace the tech. The DualSense

After spending a few hours with the PlayStation 5 and its completely redesigned DualSense controller, I can say with confidence that the new haptics and audio features certainly work — and could become integral to the gaming experience. But only if — and it’s a big if — developers truly embrace the tech.

The DualSense controller replaces the extremely familiar and beloved design of the DualShock, which has remained largely the same shape since the first one shipped for the original PlayStation 25 years ago.

While the general layout is the same, the feel of the new controller is significantly different and the appearance is aligned with the PS5’s distinctive but questionable hyper-futuristic look. I’m not entirely sold on the new shape but I’ve also had a long time to get used to the old one, so I’m withholding judgment while I work on the full review.

Shipping with every PS5 is Astro’s Playroom, which like Nintendoland and Wii Sports is intended to provide a reference experience for all the controller’s new features. It may not be quite as original or persistently enjoyable as Nintendo’s pack-ins (which still number among the best games for their platforms), but it’s a fun little playroom that does a good job showing off the DualSense.

The first and perhaps most immediately compelling feature is the haptic feedback on the trigger buttons, L2 and R2. It’s one of those things that when you feel it working, you immediately start thinking about how it could be used.

What it does is allow not just precision vibration but actual resistance to be added to the triggers, something that sounds vague in theory but is very easy to grasp, so to speak, in practice.

For instance, in the setup process for Astro’s Playroom the feature is introduced by simply asking you to pull the triggers and feel it. You’ll certainly have pulled them before that, so you know that they’re nearly frictionless normally. But suddenly they’re pushing back against your finger — then a click, and the resistance is gone.

“What is this sorcery?” I recall saying out loud at the time, or something like it but more profane. It really is that immediately compelling.

Later, in the first stage I tried of the game, your little robot jumps into a sort of spring suit (a metal spring, not a linen two-piece) and you have to pull the trigger to make it jump. The haptics in this case truly give a feel of compressing something (though, having played with springs before, I know they don’t feel like this), and importantly give you a non-visual, intuitive indicator of how far you’ve depressed the trigger. My brain was quicker to register how far I’d pulled it with the combination of sound, haptics and graphics than graphics alone. And because the feeling is localized to the trigger you’re using, there’s no confusion with the greater vibrations of the all-purpose rumble system.

The Switch’s Joy-Cons have a sort of precision haptics in them, and while the demo of that feature was interesting — feeling little objects rattle around “inside” the controller — it’s actually quite hard to think of ways it could be used in gameplay. And indeed few games have done so, though to be fair rumble in general is probably better because of it.

In the DualSense’s case, I was immediately thinking, “this would be great for…” and wishing I’d had it in this or that game in the past. It opens up possibilities I’ve never liked the idea of, like “pull the trigger halfway to do one thing, all the way to do another. It’s also potentially a great accessibility feature.

Having a speaker and microphone in the controller is nothing new, though they appear to have been upgraded for the DualSense. Few games have been able to use these features properly, and Astro’s Playroom resorts to the old “blow on the controller to make a propeller go” thing. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do that in any real game — but why can’t I yell “Go, cyberdog! Attack the monster on the right” to direct my (sadly fictitious) companion, or something like that?

Unfortunately that gets to the heart of what makes even the excellent haptic feature a potentially lost cause. Developers need to design for them in a big way, and that’s difficult when you can’t guarantee that people will want or be able to use them. Not only that, but if you want to release on Xbox and PC too, you have to remove them. So they become optional features… and since they’re optional, they can’t be integrated into the game as deeply to begin with, making them less compelling overall. It’s happened over and over with various innovations gaming companies have come up with over the years, and it may happen with this generation’s gimmicks as well.

Sony’s best bet is to make integration painless and highly incentivized, though it’s hard to imagine how multi-platform developers like Ubisoft can do much more than the minimum. Serious use will likely be limited to a handful of top-shelf Sony-funded PS5 exclusives that players will marvel at.

It’s an interesting new gameplay feature, but hardly one that screams “next-generation.” Indeed little about the next consoles from Sony or Microsoft screams that except the specs. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth buying — but don’t expect anything transformative.

News: SpaceX launches Starlink app and provides pricing and service info to early beta testers

• October 27, 2020
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SpaceX has debuted an official app for its Starlink satellite broadband internet service, for both iOS and Android devices. The Starlink app allows users to manage their connection – but to take part you’ll have to be part of the official beta program, and the initial public rollout of that is only just about to

SpaceX has debuted an official app for its Starlink satellite broadband internet service, for both iOS and Android devices. The Starlink app allows users to manage their connection – but to take part you’ll have to be part of the official beta program, and the initial public rollout of that is only just about to begin, according to emails SpaceX sent to potential beta testers this week.

The Starlink app provides guidance on how to install the Starlink receiver dish, as well as connection status (including signal quality), a device overview for seeing what’s connected to your network, and a speed test tool. It’s similar to other mobile apps for managing home wifi connections and routers. Meanwhile, the emails to potential testers that CNBC obtained detail what users can expect in terms of pricing, speeds and latency.

The initial Starlink public beta test is called the “Better than Nothing Beta Program,” SpaceX confirms in their app description, and will be rolled out across the U.S. and Canada before the end of the year – which matches up with earlier stated timelines. As per the name, SpaceX is hoping to set expectations for early customers, with speeds users can expect ranging from between 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s, and latency of 20ms to 40ms according to the customer emails, with some periods including no connectivity at all. Even with expectations set low, if those values prove accurate, it should be a big improvement for users in some hard-to-reach areas where service is currently costly, unreliable and operating at roughly dial-up equivalent speeds.

In terms of pricing, SpaceX says in the emails that the cost for participants in this beta program will be $99 per moth, plus a one-time cost of $499 initially to pay for the hardware, which includes the mounting kit and receiver dish, as well as a router with wifi networking capabilities.

The goal eventually is offer reliably, low-latency broadband that provides consistent connection by handing off connectivity between a large constellation of small satellites circling the globe in low Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX has nearly 1,000 of those launched, but it hopes to launch many thousands more before it reaches global coverage and offers general availability of its services.

SpaceX has already announced some initial commercial partnerships and pilot programs for Starlink, too, including a team-up with Microsoft to connect that company’s mobile Azure data centers, and a project with an East Texas school board to connect the local community.

News: Netflix is developing a live action ‘Assassin’s Creed’ show

• October 27, 2020
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Netflix announced this morning that it’s partnering with Ubisoft to adapt the game publisher’s “Assassin’s Creed” franchise into a live action series. The franchise jumps around in history, telling the story of a secret society of assassins with “genetic memory” and their centuries-long battle the knights templar. It has sold 155 million games worldwide and

Netflix announced this morning that it’s partnering with Ubisoft to adapt the game publisher’s “Assassin’s Creed” franchise into a live action series.

The franchise jumps around in history, telling the story of a secret society of assassins with “genetic memory” and their centuries-long battle the knights templar. It has sold 155 million games worldwide and was also turned into a nearly incomprehensible 2016 film starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, which underperformed at the box office.

The companies say that they’re currently looking for a showrunner. Jason Altman and Danielle Kreinik of Ubisoft’s film and television division will serve as executive producers. (In addition to working on adaptations of Ubisoft’s intellectual property, the publisher is also involved in the Apple TV+ industry comedy “Mythic Quest.”)

“We’re excited to partner with Ubisoft and bring to life the rich, multilayered storytelling that Assassin’s Creed is beloved for,” said Netflix’s vice president of original series Peter Friedlander in a statement. “From its breathtaking historical worlds and massive global appeal as one of the best selling video game franchises of all time, we are committed to carefully crafting epic and thrilling entertainment based on this distinct IP and provide a deeper dive for fans and our members around the world to enjoy.”

It sounds like there could be follow-up shows as well, with the announcement saying that Netflix and Ubisoft will “tap into the iconic video game’s trove of dynamic stories with global mass appeal for adaptations of live action, animated, and anime series.”

Netflix recently placed an eight-episode order for “Resident Evil,” another video game franchise that was previously adapted for the big screen. And it also had a big hit with its adaptation of “The Witcher,” which is based on a fantasy book series that was popularized via video games.

News: Facetune maker’s new app Filtertune let anyone create and share personalized photo filters

• October 27, 2020
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Facetune maker Lightricks is out today with a new app, Filtertune, designed to create a community around custom photo filters. With the app, creators can make their own personalized preset photos filters, then share them across social media as photos that have a special QR code attached. When others see a filter they like, they

Facetune maker Lightricks is out today with a new app, Filtertune, designed to create a community around custom photo filters. With the app, creators can make their own personalized preset photos filters, then share them across social media as photos that have a special QR code attached. When others see a filter they like, they can screenshot it to import it back into the Filtertune app for their own use.

While it would be easier to create some sort of in-app system for sharing filters — similar to Instagram’s “Effect Gallery,” for example — Lightricks’ user base isn’t concentrated in one single app.

Instead, it offers an ever-expanding suite of mobile photo and video editing apps, including its flagship Facetune and sequel, Facetune2, as well as Facetune Video, Enlight Quickshot, Photofox, Videoleap, Pixaloop, Boosted, Seen, PosterBoost, Artleap, and Beatleap.

Combined, its collection of apps have seen over 400 million downloads to date, but its active user numbers are much smaller. Lightricks this summer said its collection of apps had 200 million registered users. Paid subscribers had reached 3 million as of last year.

While these numbers and the apps’ growth helped to turn Lightricks into a unicorn, Instagram offers access to a much larger photo sharing community. That’s why it makes sense for Filtertune to provide tools that allow users to tap into existing social media platforms to share their filters and discover new ones.

In fact, Lightricks says the idea for the app was actually prompted by social media trends where online influencers were posting “How I Edit My Photos,” and offering their own presets for fans to download or purchase.

Filtertune, however, isn’t a marketplace for filters. It’s just a tool for creation, editing and sharing.

Using the app, you can either edit an existing filter or create one of your own from scratch.

The app focuses on realistic photo editing, not using overlays of digital assets to create new styles — like apps that swap out the background, for example, or those that use AR.

When your filter is complete, you tap the sharing button which adds a banner to your photo that reads: “Get this filter,” and offers download instructions along with a QR code. You then save this image to your iPhone Camera Roll, then post it anywhere you want — like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, in an email, in a messaging app, or on your own website.

When others see the shared image, they save it to their own Camera Roll by taking a screenshot.

The next time those users open the Filtertune app, it will scan for new filters by looking for images with a QR code. When it finds them, the new filters will be added to the in-app collection.

Users can then use Filtertune to edit photos with any of the custom filters discovered from across social media.

It is interesting to see how much Filtertune leans on Instagram to drive discovery here. Even the “Discover” button in the app, when tapped, takes you directly to the #filtertune hashtag on Instagram, instead of a dedicated section within its own app where users could find new filters to try.

“Filtertune represents a natural evolution of our growing product experiences, and with it, Lightricks will continue fostering a culture of online community, sharing, and collaboration that is necessary for young artists, creators, and anyone who enjoys social media,” said Zeev Farbman, co-founder and CEO at Lightricks, in a statement about the new app’s launch.

Farbman also noted that Lightricks’ Facetune2 and Quickshot apps have seen a 30% increase and a 35% increase in users in 2020, respectively. The company also told TechCrunch that Ligthtricks, overall, has seen a 45% increase in monthly active users this year.

The new app is a free download on iOS. 

News: Backed by Mr. Beast and Nadeshot, Backbone One could finally crack mobile gaming

• October 27, 2020
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I get to play with a lot of new hardware from startups and it runs the gamut from super polished to barely working, neither of which is a value judgement! But every once in a while I get to mess with a new piece of kit that is just so fully realized that I am

I get to play with a lot of new hardware from startups and it runs the gamut from super polished to barely working, neither of which is a value judgement! But every once in a while I get to mess with a new piece of kit that is just so fully realized that I am literally shocked. 

The Backbone One controller is one of those situations. It’s a game controller for iPhones that has slick ergonomics, solid button feel, sensitive analog triggers and great build quality. But what makes Backbone One special is the companion app and service that ships with it and enables a truly clever software layer enabling cross-app multiplayer, game recording, highlight editing and quick swap. 

Designers from Ideo and Astro Studios helped realize Backbone and the pedigree of people who have crafted devices like the Xbox 360 controller really show here. Wide L1/R1 buttons make it easy to tap on mobile. Analog L2/R2 triggers feel deep but tight. The latest Lightning connector standard means extremely low latency for control signals. 

The controller is around 7” long in its compact state and uses a clever sliding mechanism to expand outwards to up to 10” in size. It easily fits Apple’s “Plus” sized phones and when you’re using one of those it feels like a full on game console for the first time I can remember.

There are acoustic tunneling scoops at the inside edges that direct sound forward from the phone speakers and there is work being done behind the scenes to cancel out the specific sounds the Backbone One’s buttons make so that you don’t hear those while you’re playing. 

But it’s the software that makes Backbone One really special.

To co-opt a biblical phrase, hardware without software is dead. And the Backbone One is really, really alive.

Behind the Backbone One is Backbone itself, which is a ‘companion app’ but is really a live gaming service. It has integrated cross-game voice chat, game switching, parties and a friends list. It lets you get push notifications when your friends are on and slide right into a game with them with a single tap. It’s remarkably slick and feels as first-party as you could make something that is literally not first-party feel.

Backbone was founded by Maneet Khaira in the summer of 2018 while interning at YouTube and wrapping up at Columbia. 

Khaira notes that one of the biggest issues in mobile gaming is that there is a ton of activation energy when it comes to jumping in and playing with friends. The major games are there: Call of Duty, Fortnite (eventually, again), PUBG — but the last mile issue is major. 

Khaira points out that while there are plenty of examples of top-tier gaming titles on iPhone, there is just a desert of content created on these platforms available to watch on Twitch or YouTube. He likens it to a hysteresis — a lagging behind of an effect from its cause. There are so many mobile gamers that there should be a ton of mobile content shared, but because the mechanisms to do so have been so poor and so under-crafted, we have next to nothing. 

Backbone changes that completely. 

Here are the basic pillars of Backbone:

1. Gameplay has to feel good. The Backbone controller had to be best-in-class hardware.
2. Content creation. It had to be easy and seamless to capture highlights, clips and footage and share them to your preferred platform. 
3. Playing with friends has to be instantaneous. Backbone uses notifications about when friends start playing across any game and you can do so from one central friends list. 

Because Backbone is a support app, it gets a bunch of special privileges that would normally not be granted to a ‘regular’ class of app. Backbone One is always on while it’s attached, which means that the app can do whatever it needs to do no matter what app you’re in or for how long. This is huge because it enables the Backbone button on the controller to add games to your dashboard, swap easily between them and lets you get at your friends list contained in Backbone.

The stopwatch time for attaching the Backbone One to your phone and beginning to play a game in multiplayer is measured in seconds, not minutes. It’s exactly what you need in the mobile context.

It also enables any-time recording of clips and highlights that store locally on your device but can be uploaded anywhere at 1080p/30fps HEVC. When you’re in game you can just smash the Capture button to start recording and tap it to screenshot. The Backbone app also has some ML work going on to identify highlight-worthy clips and mark them automatically. You can also tag them yourself while you play.

And Backbone One does this on less power than the crap earbuds that (used to) come in an iPhone box. You won’t notice any major power drain from the accessory itself. 

If Backbone can manage to get a partnership with one or two majors to have a built-in control scheme that takes advantage of the proper dead zones and timing it could be a real watershed moment for mobile gaming. 

But right now it works with most games that have controller support right out of the box. No game needs to do anything special to take advantage of the majority of Backbone features. This basically adds on a layer of inter-game social and clip sharing. 

It’s all of the basic features of Game Center, Twitch, PSN and Xbox Live rolled into one — but on iPhone. And, of course, the BackBone one works just fine with Xbox and PlayStation remote play apps.

Sometimes a list of investors can tell you a lot about how serious a company is about getting the right kind of money. For a company building a gaming service and peripheral hardware, Backbone couldn’t have a more solid column. Backbone is backed by MrBeast, Preston, Kwebbelkop, Typical Gamer, Night Media, Nadeshot, and Ludlow Ventures, as well as Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures. Pretty much exactly the profile I would want to see for a company serious about social and mobile gaming. 

In many ways, Backbone feels like a spiritual successor to OpenFeint. If you’re not familiar, OpenFeint was the first modern mobile gaming network. It launched the year after the iPhone App Store and was part of a game called Aurora Feint. It enabled multiplayer, scoreboards and messaging. The founder of OpenFeint? Jason Citron. Jason’s current startup, that also shares a lot of spiritual luggage with OpenFeint? Discord.

It’s hard to overstate how important OpenFeint was at the time. As the app ecosystem was emerging it was clear that games would be a big part of what made the iPhone successful and this was the first cross-game network that allowed people to take advantage of one of the first phones to have a persistent, high-quality (ish) internet connection. Apple launched Game Center as a basic response to this need but it has never put any real investment behind it since. Backbone is so good that I could actually see Apple hauling out the repo and assigning engineering talent to get it working well again. The time has come for this idea and Backbone’s execution is so top notch here that it makes the case open and shut.

I’ve been testing the controller for a few weeks now with a variety of games. I played a quick match of Call of Duty Warzone with Khaira and even though we didn’t secure the dub it was massively more playable than running with touch controls. My very first session of CoD I had a 28 kill game in cod mobile and, even though I was put into a lobby that prioritizes controller users the other players had like 5 kills each. Though you can now pair console controllers to iPhone, the Backbone is so much better than any of the other integrated controllers on the market that it will quickly become a must have for any mobile player that actually wants to be competitive. I have spent as much time with Apple mobile hardware and the people that have created it as probably anyone on the planet so please understand that I don’t say this lightly but this really feels like the game controller and network Apple would have made if it understood competitive games.

The Backbone One controller runs $99 and can be purchased via the free Backbone app today.